ZDm
DRRAAAFFFTTT UNCOMPLETE, WILL FINISH LATER. PLEASE TELL ME OF ANY DICKUPS I MADE IN THE TEXT. Corrupted if you read this then you must iafsnbjusakshasbfhjawnbjkansafas! Quickly! Adding more.. This is more of a nostalgic look back at ZDm from my point of view than an informative wiki article, images soon. ---- 'ZDm' ZDm("Z'ombie '''D'eath'm'''atch") is a mod started by Corrupted a couple of years ago that is still being developed. At its current state it is at version 3 ''pre-alpha and in the process of being completely rebuilt. ZDm is a type of gamemode where the player must essentially survive in a zombie-infested post-apocalyptic world set in the future. However, due to the lack of players on RTB the AI must compensate for this, making it form the core of ZDm, therefore the AI is the most heavily developed feature of ZDm so far and the main development focus. History Originally ZDm was intended to just be a little minigame similar to 'tag' where one person would be the initial infected zombie who would then hunt down the players throughout the map, when one of the infected players manages to damage or injure another player, then that player then became infected and instantly transformed into a zombie who would then hunt down any other surviving players until either all the surviving players were eliminated (Infected team wins) or the survivors manage to survive for five or ten minutes. (Survivor team wins) ''ZDmv1'' ---- This was the first version of ZDm (ZDmv1) which was played in a small sealed base that consisted of six main sectors: ''-The Spawn-Point: A long vertical tube that the players would spawn in, when they spawned they would fall from the tube and gently slide down into the hallway sector with the entrance to the med-lab directly in front of them. Players who were AFK caused problems as the tube soon became crammed and caused anyone who spawned after the person who was AFK to become stuck. (Goddamn it Mecha ;_;) ''-Med-Lab: ''Directly in front of the exit from the spawn point. this was the place where the initial infected zombie would spawn, but would also be the location of health vials that were stackable in the inventory, although useless as a single hit from anyone infected would turn you into a zombie, regardless of your health level. (I planned to change it so that the chance of becoming infected depended on your health level and the higher it was the lower the chance to become infected was.) '-Armoury: Not really an armoury, but what kind of base wouldn't have one? The only weapon it had was a crossbow (Only in the later version though), apart from that it had a zombie head in a display case that could be equipped to force-infect you for any wannabe zombies out there. However in later versions it also had a teleportation room that would teleport you to the “Security room” and the site for ZDmv1 R2. The teleportation room wasn't intended to be part of the actual game, it was instead intended to be a kind of link between old and experimental ZDm-related builds, a history room of sorts. The security room housed every weapon in the HL2 weapon pack as well as a custom-scripted auto-homing plasma-hax shotgun cannon thing, which was unobtainable to any ordinary players as it was sealed behind transparent brick walls, butit was more of an admin hangout kind of place. ''-The Core:'' The name is somewhat deceiving as it's only the power-core of the base, a walkway around it and nothing else. It was built out of a transparent cone brick and used Joey or Brandon's Shadowy core brick technique thing, I can't remember what it was called. I also once opened up a public build version of the save where anyone could add and build on the save. I think Brandon made a little collection of wires suspended to the roof that I thought would make a nice hideout and snipers nest as the bulk of the wires were mostly close to the sides of the thick mesh case that encased it, leaving the insides relatively hollow. However, I never got to incorporating that part of the build with the official version as i had quite a few saves and things got muddled up quickly. ''-Maintenance room:'' Probably the most detailed room as it was the last room I had created, most of the wires were for decoration, I planned on making the wires a trigger for the lights so that when certain wires were shot or destroyed the lights would go out, leaving you in darkness.(Perhaps even link that to other parts of the base, so that certain doors could be unlocked or locked.) It also allowed you to go to the roof of the base where you could see the tower where you would spawn in, the med-lab and three or so helicopter landing pads. ''-The Hallway: ''Linking all of the rooms together, this is where most of the 'action' took place.(I even burned it down once, shit was so cash) 'ZDmv1''R2-''' ---- The site for ZDmv1 R2 was that of a lab, but far more spacious and allowed players to be far more opportunistic as the main area was much larger and taller, larger than the room the power-core in ZDMv1 took up. The main room was filled with walkways and was highly detailed, the med-lab this time was actually a part of it this time, not being on a distant part of the map and linked by depth bricks with telewalls, which lowered the lag dramatically but made the transfer between rooms far less seamless. I never got to finish the map as it was during then that RTB began to start losing a dangerous amount of people, making a mod that relied on at least 10 people per game useless as there were hardly enough active people playing RTB to actually play the mod. Nevertheless I continued to build it, one time a group of RTB veterans joined and started talking whilst I was building, I can remember Red Alpha being there along with maybe Mecha or Spiderninja and some others. That was the time when my simple little mod just could not find an audience big enough to sustain a lengthy game, which lead to the downtime.. 'Downtime-' ---- For a long time I did nothing and watched RTB roll on its back and slowly wither away. But it was during that time I got better at scripting, over the course of IDon'tKnowHowLong I had learned how to create simple but advanced AI bots that did my bidding and other scripts that could then support those bots and the game. That was when ZDmv2 was born and formulated, a mod that did not rely on the logic of players, a simple modified weapon and a couple of basic scripts that changed people to different teams, but at a cost, I could no longer host anymore. "Shit sucked, bro." 'ZDmv2-' ---- ZDmv2 used bots as the main source for enemies, which allowed a small amount of players to effectively play a lengthy game, the bots also allowed me to not only focus on a handful of zombies, but rather hundreds of them, giant hordes of zombies, along with specialized zombies that were created for specific situations, such as a large explosive zombie that would rush in and break up a well-organized team of survivors, or one with an ability to drag out a single survivor from a group of escaping survivors, slowly taking away each member, scattering the heard, if you will, this I thought would force players to use tactics and strategies instead of blindly rushing in, making the game more interesting. "Think of L4D, but in lego" However, ZDmv2 never really got finished, there was always more features I intended to put in, but eventually those intended features just piled up and pushed the more important features away with those little misc features that people tend to get carried away with. The first ALPHA version had Spectator to host, he built custom maps, but my bots were far from perfect during that time, so far I remember 2 or 3 seperate map save, maybe two mission-styled (Get from point A to B, continue progress in next map) and another TDM-based (Standard TDM, but with bots when there arne't enough players). It was during the ALPHA and eventually the BETA versions that I realised that my mod was in shambles, the AI was buggy, zombie types were extremely limited and determined by weapons and even the weapons themselves were mediocre, I just didn't have the scripting knowledge needed to fully develop ZDm. "Gotta get my shit in order." I did however get the bulk of the AI done, albeit the code was rather messy it did eventually function quite well after extensive fine tuning and debugging. After a month (procastination at its finest) or so the hybrid pathfinding system I had made could let the bots navigate a maze and get to the 'cheese' quite easily, albeit in an inefficient manner, but at least it worked. But just as development seemed to be going smoothly RTB died even more, Spectator left and I was left without a host. "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!" Eventually I found someone who could host, Zool, a guy who gets banned from his computer quite often and lives in Australialandiah, this was when I decided to distribute my files to Zool as .DSOs as I was getting somewhat paranoid.. Around this time my memory is blurry, probably because I didn't really do anything scripting-wise for months, but I did script now and again.